Man, I hardly use/. "friends"/"foes" feature, but if you play DKC (with your children, which is a wonderful thing to do in the future for me), you automatically become my friend:) There are more of us, thanks for that one!:)
Why 8-bit computers are featured on /. so rarely?
on
Retro Gaming Gets Hot
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't know much about 8-bit computers market in US, but in my country, 'retro gaming' is more like '8-bit computers', and not 'gaming consoles'. Of course, NES (Pegauss) was available here, but machines, which were much more popular for an average teenage users, were Atari 65 XE, Commodore 64, and last, but not least - ZX Spectrum (aka Timex 2048, which of I was a proud owner).
Why are such computers featured so rarely on slashdot retro games? Wasn't they popular in US?
Another thing, big "booya!" to all authors of emulator software. Thanks to their software, I use my unix workstation to do some gaming sometimes - nowadays games are too much schematic for me, sorry!:)
What's the point of having the machine look like invisible/unused, if you still can watch packets with data (heck, even encrypted) come to it?
portknocking won't help you keeping your IP hidden. Having a tunnel from your IP to a trusted machine will (so you will appear as another IP and noone administrating that machine will give your "secret" IP to public).
pr0n kiddiez? Man, just change SSH port from 22 to 2222 and you have pr0n kiddiez off your back. In the times of scanner automation (scan IP range, find vulnerable hosts, launch all known exploits, install rootkits) people won't bother trying to hack your sshd if it's not standard anyway - just because in the time they are trying to find, where is your sshd at, they can find & hack all those 5 windows 98 machines, which NEVER saw Windows Update, on the same network.
Anyway, dear/. editors, it's a great way to ruin a story. 90% of posts in this discussion are offtopic, just because you did a typo (for those who plan to mod me down - I did posted a serious comment already, have mercy!).
Unused IP? Yes, with TCP_BLACKHOLE, why not. But... if portknocking is active, it is also a kind of listening service - even if it won't show up on nmap, it also does listen for network events. At a given level of abstraction, this will be the same as network daemon listening on open port;)
No, sire. I'm thinking about a very simple daemon, written in high-level language, that would manipulate my firewall rules using unencrypted OTPs. It could open ssh port for 5 seconds only to IPs, that gave right one-time password. Store only MD5 hashes of those one-time passwords on the server, and voila.
In Python I could write such daemon in 30 minutes or so. "man ipfw" or "man ipf" would be the part, that would take me most time (not to mention testing, of course):)
Yes, of course. Hiding such things means exactly, that you use "security by obscurity" approach, which "portknocking" is told not to use. Really only good thing is, when compared portknocking to one-time passwords in my proposed approach, that in passwords each "digit" can be one from about 63 characters possible (upper case, lower case, 10 digits) - and in portknocking each knock could be around 655350 - which makes a short port knock sequence harder to bruteforce, than a long one-time password.
A list of one-time passwords & a simple daemon, that verifies them & enables ssh access (in some high level language) at the user request would do as fine. Give such daemon some IQ, so it would make brute-force attacks very hard, and you have the same thing. Except for the "cool" part.
Mandrake's luckily not dead, but it's always worth to read a story, how other people didn't manage or had trouble leading business - so we can learn from their faults. You can IMO learn more from them, than from reading success stories. For example, check this one!
There are a lot of chances to improve FreeBSD advocacy (and BSD in general). Simplest example, Ports/pkgsrc and Gentoo. Suddenly, Gentoo comes out, everyone start to use it, I hear a lot about it, wonderful. {Free,Net,Open}BSD had such facilities for around a *decade*, I belive. BSDs need marketing!
This is not what you asked for, but it is also gives a clue - I've had Linux 2.4.18 (by the time it was stable) and a stable FreeBSD (4.something, sorry, I don't remember - both Linux and FreeBSD were the latest stable releases, and I used them on the same hardware, so this is okay to compare them, I think). The DB wasn't too big (20,000 rows in one table, 5,000 in other, 1,500 in another).
If I made a typo in SQL query, the database system could return as much as 15000000000 rows at a time.
In such situation, FreeBSD was running slower and slower, and finally run out of swap (and killed the DB process) - but I was still able to type stuff in terminals, switch virtual desktops - or even cancel the query (restart DB daemon myself) before the machine ran out of swap.
On Linux - 2.4.18, mind that, I haven't seen how 2.6.x handles such situations - machine almost immediatley became very unresponsive (I have had around 10 - 15 seconds to kill DB server, when I heard it starts to utilize swap - after that time, I was unable to run any process, shell, anything) - and I either had to wait until it exhaust all the swap (1 GB took around 5 - 10 minutes) and becomes responsive - or hard reboot it.
I think, that this is a good example, that FreeBSD behaves properly under high load. Even if that was purely SQL programmers fault:)
Yes, indeed. Except, that the most often used format is 2.88 MB floppy - I haven't seen such floppy drive anywhere around. Are they rare/unused, is that the same in other countries - or were they popular in some area, some time ago, at least?
Elivs, by different architectures I meant also non-Debian _and_ non-Linux operating systems. Cries for graphics installer appear on freebsd-advocacy@ mailing list from time to time (too often, if you ask me or other advocacy@ regulars). Of course - it is not that needed, but if someone did it, the project for sure wouldn't suffer from this. This also counts for OpenBSD and NetBSD... anyway, I don't think that there are as big chances for autodetecting stuff on BSDs, like they are on Linux. Perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps not.
What I'd really like to see would be something universal and portable:
divide the installer code wisely, you will have UI part and the installer part (that does actual work, system-dependent) separated.
GUI? It shouldn't be that hard. XFree86 for graphics installer are the same everywhere;
Want to instal via serial port? No problem, just add another user interface module
High-level language, not C. Sorry, C programs just need too much time to debug, and I don't see where would you have any benefits of using C in case of installer (installation process always takes time, and it mostly depends on HDD or network throughput)
There are some OS, that lack an easy graphics mode installer. They could benefit
That would of course need a few megabytes of RAM and an isntallation CD. Is anyone booting off from floppy disks anyway? (what's a floppy disk, BTW?)
+1 here. Taking some samples at crime site also involves analyzing DNA found in semen, sputum, blood, and many more. Having whole DNA collected gives much more possibilities. Also, I agree with collecting DNA samples of people who are arrested and not yet convinced for a felony - no matter, what ID I have, no matter, what does my face look like, if the same DNA was found in a suspect some else place, well, you got me then.
Just like IP address. Only longer. You got mine already, what's the difference if you had my DNA right now? Yes, you could clone me, perhaps, someday or use my DNA to artifical fertilization. I don't mind both, I was born to spread my DNA, just like we all were. That's biology, that's evolution, it would be hard to disagree with that.
If you want to choose your scripting language by measures like "Program Lengths by Language", "the smallest running program", "access environment variable", "grep with -F -i -h handling, usage, grep'ing many files", then yes, go for it, that report was done for you.
Me? I'd rather choose my scripting *and* programming language by some other measures, which mainly involve:
portability
object model
ease of writing C/asm extensions (for speed!)
extension modules available in default installation
I have my own choice (not the winner, it's my *choice* - I haven't compared and/or used other ones mentioned too extensivley). I have as portable interpreter, as Java (except it does work, not only claims that), with much smaller footprint; I can code extensions in C using simple syntax (it's very easy); I have already thousands of available modules in the base installation.
I am pretty sure, that other tools, mentioned in the report, also allow pretty much the same, some of them do that better, some of them are worse, some are not worth using (as we seen, network stack can be written in PHP) - that's not the point. In my opinion, that report seems like comparing pneumatic hammers, ordinary hammers, sledgehammers and hamsters (mainly because "hammer" sounds similar to "hamster", so what the heck, let's compare them) - by something like color or shape, not by the things they can do.
You shouldn't compare tools like this (well, except for purely academical purposes), it's not useful at all for me. And, if you want to choose your tools basing on such reports, well then, good luck.
quickly came to the conclusion that Sun's older Solaris 7 was the snappiest performer on this low-power machine.
Let me guess, a system, that was started on SPARCs performs better on a SPARC, than other 2 systems, one of which started as a port to x86, and another one, which is aimed to be first portable, then efficient. Hmm. Interesting!:)
NetBSD team is obsessed with portability, and that's a very good thing. Each part of the OS tends to be most portable and clean. Basically, NetBSD package collection, which I personally use on FreeBSD and Linux is much cleaner, than FreeBSD Ports or Gentoo Portage (and it is portable, you should see that already). NetBSD is missing, for example, tcsh in the base install, which sometimes will make people say it's obscure, but well. Even if you don't use NetBSD and you do use FreeBSD or OpenBSD, chances are that you're still using large parts of work done by NetBSD team (you do use rc.d scripts in your FreeBSD 5.x, do you? what about USB devices?:). Having a closer look at NetBSD is definetley a good lesson, even if that's not going to be your "number one" OS.
Having some small software developed from time to time, I hit software bugs, as usual. In case they occur both on Linux and BSD, Linux user has to give the architecture name, Linux distribution used name, kernel version, gcc version, glibc version... In case of BSD, this is architecture and BSD version.
Reproducing bugs? If it hits FreeBSD-CURRENT, other people can checkout and build whole system, exactly like it was by the date I provide. Try to do the same thing with your Linux OS;)
Building packages? Yes, that can take a lof of time, except using pkgsrc/Ports I can build any versions I want, and they stay consistent with the rest of the packaging system. Packaging system does everything for me, downloads, checks checksums, applies patches, builds. Even inexperienced user can try this, just by changing version number in Makefile (which is a plain text file, in most cases easy to read and understand). Unless you're using Gentoo, I don't think you can do that that easily with your Linux OS - either you have to do some more complicated tasks, or you end up installing packages by hand - not to mention, that's more time-consuming, than building from Ports/pkgsrc, you end up with having files not maintained by the packaging system.
There are a few well known HTTP serving projects in Python (like this one), but the best thing in my opinion is Twisted - the framework of your internet, which features, among others, a 100% Python implementation of web server & ssh server/client. I strongly suggest anyone, who knows Python, to have a look at Twisted - many of ideas implemented there are logic and clean, it's a good programming lesson for sure.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, I hardly use /. "friends"/"foes" feature, but if you play DKC (with your children, which is a wonderful thing to do in the future for me), you automatically become my friend :) There are more of us, thanks for that one! :)
Why are such computers featured so rarely on slashdot retro games? Wasn't they popular in US?
Another thing, big "booya!" to all authors of emulator software. Thanks to their software, I use my unix workstation to do some gaming sometimes - nowadays games are too much schematic for me, sorry! :)
portknocking won't help you keeping your IP hidden. Having a tunnel from your IP to a trusted machine will (so you will appear as another IP and noone administrating that machine will give your "secret" IP to public).
pr0n kiddiez? Man, just change SSH port from 22 to 2222 and you have pr0n kiddiez off your back. In the times of scanner automation (scan IP range, find vulnerable hosts, launch all known exploits, install rootkits) people won't bother trying to hack your sshd if it's not standard anyway - just because in the time they are trying to find, where is your sshd at, they can find & hack all those 5 windows 98 machines, which NEVER saw Windows Update, on the same network.
Anyway, dear /. editors, it's a great way to ruin a story. 90% of posts in this discussion are offtopic, just because you did a typo (for those who plan to mod me down - I did posted a serious comment already, have mercy!).
... only if I had mod points :)
Unused IP? Yes, with TCP_BLACKHOLE, why not. But... if portknocking is active, it is also a kind of listening service - even if it won't show up on nmap, it also does listen for network events. At a given level of abstraction, this will be the same as network daemon listening on open port ;)
In Python I could write such daemon in 30 minutes or so. "man ipfw" or "man ipf" would be the part, that would take me most time (not to mention testing, of course) :)
Yes, of course. Hiding such things means exactly, that you use "security by obscurity" approach, which "portknocking" is told not to use. Really only good thing is, when compared portknocking to one-time passwords in my proposed approach, that in passwords each "digit" can be one from about 63 characters possible (upper case, lower case, 10 digits) - and in portknocking each knock could be around 655350 - which makes a short port knock sequence harder to bruteforce, than a long one-time password.
A list of one-time passwords & a simple daemon, that verifies them & enables ssh access (in some high level language) at the user request would do as fine. Give such daemon some IQ, so it would make brute-force attacks very hard, and you have the same thing. Except for the "cool" part.
Mandrake's luckily not dead, but it's always worth to read a story, how other people didn't manage or had trouble leading business - so we can learn from their faults. You can IMO learn more from them, than from reading success stories. For example, check this one!
There are a lot of chances to improve FreeBSD advocacy (and BSD in general). Simplest example, Ports/pkgsrc and Gentoo. Suddenly, Gentoo comes out, everyone start to use it, I hear a lot about it, wonderful. {Free,Net,Open}BSD had such facilities for around a *decade*, I belive. BSDs need marketing!
If I made a typo in SQL query, the database system could return as much as 15000000000 rows at a time.
In such situation, FreeBSD was running slower and slower, and finally run out of swap (and killed the DB process) - but I was still able to type stuff in terminals, switch virtual desktops - or even cancel the query (restart DB daemon myself) before the machine ran out of swap.
On Linux - 2.4.18, mind that, I haven't seen how 2.6.x handles such situations - machine almost immediatley became very unresponsive (I have had around 10 - 15 seconds to kill DB server, when I heard it starts to utilize swap - after that time, I was unable to run any process, shell, anything) - and I either had to wait until it exhaust all the swap (1 GB took around 5 - 10 minutes) and becomes responsive - or hard reboot it.
I think, that this is a good example, that FreeBSD behaves properly under high load. Even if that was purely SQL programmers fault :)
Yes, indeed. Except, that the most often used format is 2.88 MB floppy - I haven't seen such floppy drive anywhere around. Are they rare/unused, is that the same in other countries - or were they popular in some area, some time ago, at least?
Elivs, by different architectures I meant also non-Debian _and_ non-Linux operating systems. Cries for graphics installer appear on freebsd-advocacy@ mailing list from time to time (too often, if you ask me or other advocacy@ regulars). Of course - it is not that needed, but if someone did it, the project for sure wouldn't suffer from this. This also counts for OpenBSD and NetBSD... anyway, I don't think that there are as big chances for autodetecting stuff on BSDs, like they are on Linux. Perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps not.
Terrible lack of time. Sorry! I thought I share such idea instead.
- divide the installer code wisely, you will have UI part and the installer part (that does actual work, system-dependent) separated.
- GUI? It shouldn't be that hard. XFree86 for graphics installer are the same everywhere;
- Want to instal via serial port? No problem, just add another user interface module
- High-level language, not C. Sorry, C programs just need too much time to debug, and I don't see where would you have any benefits of using C in case of installer (installation process always takes time, and it mostly depends on HDD or network throughput)
- There are some OS, that lack an easy graphics mode installer. They could benefit
That would of course need a few megabytes of RAM and an isntallation CD. Is anyone booting off from floppy disks anyway? (what's a floppy disk, BTW?)Just like IP address. Only longer. You got mine already, what's the difference if you had my DNA right now? Yes, you could clone me, perhaps, someday or use my DNA to artifical fertilization. I don't mind both, I was born to spread my DNA, just like we all were. That's biology, that's evolution, it would be hard to disagree with that.
BTW: jokes aside. Please :)
Me? I'd rather choose my scripting *and* programming language by some other measures, which mainly involve:
- portability
- object model
- ease of writing C/asm extensions (for speed!)
- extension modules available in default installation
I have my own choice (not the winner, it's my *choice* - I haven't compared and/or used other ones mentioned too extensivley). I have as portable interpreter, as Java (except it does work, not only claims that), with much smaller footprint; I can code extensions in C using simple syntax (it's very easy); I have already thousands of available modules in the base installation.I am pretty sure, that other tools, mentioned in the report, also allow pretty much the same, some of them do that better, some of them are worse, some are not worth using (as we seen, network stack can be written in PHP) - that's not the point. In my opinion, that report seems like comparing pneumatic hammers, ordinary hammers, sledgehammers and hamsters (mainly because "hammer" sounds similar to "hamster", so what the heck, let's compare them) - by something like color or shape, not by the things they can do.
You shouldn't compare tools like this (well, except for purely academical purposes), it's not useful at all for me. And, if you want to choose your tools basing on such reports, well then, good luck.
"And how hard did you have to beat him?" - "Oh, fairly hard..."
NetBSD team is obsessed with portability, and that's a very good thing. Each part of the OS tends to be most portable and clean. Basically, NetBSD package collection, which I personally use on FreeBSD and Linux is much cleaner, than FreeBSD Ports or Gentoo Portage (and it is portable, you should see that already). NetBSD is missing, for example, tcsh in the base install, which sometimes will make people say it's obscure, but well. Even if you don't use NetBSD and you do use FreeBSD or OpenBSD, chances are that you're still using large parts of work done by NetBSD team (you do use rc.d scripts in your FreeBSD 5.x, do you? what about USB devices? :). Having a closer look at NetBSD is definetley a good lesson, even if that's not going to be your "number one" OS.
Reproducing bugs? If it hits FreeBSD-CURRENT, other people can checkout and build whole system, exactly like it was by the date I provide. Try to do the same thing with your Linux OS ;)
Building packages? Yes, that can take a lof of time, except using pkgsrc/Ports I can build any versions I want, and they stay consistent with the rest of the packaging system. Packaging system does everything for me, downloads, checks checksums, applies patches, builds. Even inexperienced user can try this, just by changing version number in Makefile (which is a plain text file, in most cases easy to read and understand). Unless you're using Gentoo, I don't think you can do that that easily with your Linux OS - either you have to do some more complicated tasks, or you end up installing packages by hand - not to mention, that's more time-consuming, than building from Ports/pkgsrc, you end up with having files not maintained by the packaging system.
Have fun! :)
Python has already features like a simple HTTP server or asynchronous sockets library - built-in, portable (unix, win32, MacOS - no problem).
There are a few well known HTTP serving projects in Python (like this one), but the best thing in my opinion is Twisted - the framework of your internet, which features, among others, a 100% Python implementation of web server & ssh server/client. I strongly suggest anyone, who knows Python, to have a look at Twisted - many of ideas implemented there are logic and clean, it's a good programming lesson for sure.
Have fun!
QNX is not intended for the desktop use? Man, so why they bundled that Photon graphic user environment?